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gregladen | June 1, 2010I'm very please that my discussion of the "we can't ever know what a word is" Internet meme has elicited a response from Mark Liberman at Language Log. (here) Mark was very systematic in his comments, so I will be very systematic in my responses.
1. Without a careful definition of what you mean by "word" and by "language X", questions like "how many words are there in language X" are pretty much meaningless, because different definitions will yield very different numbers.
This is very much off the mark. I can measure the distance from the earth to the moon using a variety of techniques,…
gregladen | May 31, 2010I am looking at the question: How many words are there in a language? I'd like to know for languages in general, comparatively, and for pedagogical reasons, in some well known western language which may as well be English.
What I found quite incidentally is a hornets nest of curmudgeonistic pedanticmaniacal jibberishosity. (There. Whatever the count was, it is now N+3)
(For more Falsehoods, click here. Also, listen to "Everything You Know is Sort of Wrong," on Skeptically Speaking Talk Radio. )
First I want to explain why I was interested in this at all. There has for some years been…